As he releases a new album, Bob Geldof talks about fame, fatherhood, and how
he has finally beaten Bono to one music industry award.

Shortly after I have plonked myself down in front of Sir Bob Geldof, I mention the time he told me to –––– off. He doesn’t seem surprised and he certainly doesn’t remember, but that’s probably because an expletive-free encounter with Bob Geldof is not an encounter at all. Mention something – anything – from music to famine to the wine he has just ordered, and marvel as a variety of colourful words tumble out of his potty-mouth.

When he not-so politely told me to go away, I had called him for a quote for a music story so inoffensive I can barely remember what it was. “Hmm,” he ponders. “Yeah, I probably did tell you to –––– off, and I’ll probably tell you to –––– off again in a moment.” Oh, how he laughs. “But I’m sure it wasn’t an abusive –––– off. I’m sure it was an affectionate one.”

We meet at his local in Battersea, where he orders some “terrible” rosé wine, sending it back because it’s “just so ––––––– sour”. Geldof is rumoured to own an entire mansion block overlooking the park here. Battersea, also known to residents as South Chelsea, is a stone’s throw from the Kings Road and so Sloaney that Prince William plays five-a-side football in the park. It isn’t very cool, a statement I make with some conviction given that I live there, too.

All in all, the area isn’t very Geldof, who is 60 this year but looks more modish than residents half his age. He is wearing an unbuttoned shirt and Clubmaster sunglasses, the kind worn by Buddy Holly, and sticks out like a sore thumb. Sir Bob is sitting on a bench outside the pub when I arrive, fiddling on a Nokia mobile phone that has been in existence since the late Nineties. “It goes five days without a charge, I get a signal anywhere in the world, it makes calls and sends texts. What else do you ––––––– want?” I mention that you can also play the game Snake on it. “Yeah, you can,” he says, “if you’re very sad.”

Well that told me. “It’s the AK47 of mobiles. I could get one of those smart phones, but they are all –––– and they don’t do what I want them to do.” Everyone and everything does what Bob Geldof wants them to, you see, even mobile phones.

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Anyway, he has just been interviewing a nanny for Tiger Lily, the child he adopted after the deaths of both her father, Michael Hutchence, and mother, Paula Yates. Yates, a brilliant blonde bombshell, left Geldof for Hutchence. She fell in love with the INXS frontman after she interviewed him for the Big Breakfast, a show created by Geldof’s production company, Planet 24 (which he subsequently sold for squillions). But their relationship was drug-fuelled and Hutchence was found hanged in a hotel room in 1997. Yates died of an overdose three years later.

Geldof thought Tiger Lily, who is now 14, should grow up with her half-sisters, Fifi, Peaches and Pixie. “I don’t talk about my children,” he says, when I ask about his offspring. Do they think he’s cool? “Obviously they don’t. They think I’m a total tiresome loser. They say 'daaaaad, you’re so embarrassing’ and 'dad, why is your shirt unbuttoned?!” It’s a good question though. Does he always wear it like that? “Yeah! But so does everyone.” Geldof sounds like a teenager himself now, but I don’t tell him this because he will probably tell me to –––– off.

Peaches and Pixie are now as newsworthy as their father, if not more (Fifi shuns the limelight, preferring to work for a PR firm).

Meanwhile, Geldof Snr seems to have peaked in the Eighties with Live Aid. It’s a pretty impressive achievement, and one for which he received an honorary knighthood at the age of 34, but since his days with the Boomtown Rats he has been about as creatively successful as Peaches, releasing only a couple of solo albums. If that sounds cruel, this is what Russell Brand had to say about him at an awards ceremony a couple of years ago: “It’s no surprise he’s such an expert on famine; after all, he has been dining out on I Don’t Like Mondays for 30 years.”

Oh well, if you’re going to hand it out, you have to know how to take it, and to his credit, Sir Bob doesn’t seem too bothered by any criticism – witness the ironic title of his new album, How to Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell. He says that he would describe himself as a musician rather than a campaigner or political activist “because that is how I view the world, through the prism of rock and roll. I know that sounds pathetic but since very, very early on I have used the rhetoric of rock and roll to talk about things that have bothered me.”

Still, he admits that “the impulse to [produce] music occurs infrequently. Give me a guitar and you and I could bash out a song here in half an hour. But it would be shite, and making songs simply for the sake of it just doesn’t interest me.”

The album is terribly jolly, I say. “Well, you know, that’s me...” He puts its lightness down to the love of a good woman, his long-term partner, the French actress Jeanne Marine. He says that after the break-up with Yates he was “the most detestable of people” and that he “hated women”, but Marine persisted. On the album he sings of “being in love with life tonight” and in the video for his new single, Silly Pretty Thing, he jumps up and down like a teenager on a trampoline. “It’s very punk, I’d say, for a 60-year-old to be ungraciously leaping around.”

But he thinks that the days of rock and roll as revolution have long passed, in part because of the internet and how quickly everything moves, taking the excitement out of the charts. “The faff of downloading, uploading: spare me. And with iPods music has just become a way of tuning out everyone else.”

He doesn’t think that it is necessarily a good thing that anybody can make an album and upload it onto the web. “It’ll often be shite music. Not always, but often. I mean everybody has got the means to say things, but nobody has really got anything to say. Certainly there will always be music but will it be a huge industry? I don’t know.” For someone known for his swearing, he is incredibly articulate.

Anyway, Sir Bob is off to theHay festivalsoon to play a gig. He likes doing little festivals. “I just did South By South West in Texas, and I played in a car park. In fact, I won the most prestigious award of the festival.” Which was? “The Groupies Choice Award! It’s been 35 years of hard work... I issued a statement in which I acknowledged I was up against stiff opposition, that it was a long, hard road, and saying I’d like to thank the countless Texan women who have helped me to arrive at the pinnacle of my professional life.”

He is getting a bit carried away now. “I texted Bono and said 'in our all ready over-crowded trophy rooms, I’ve just received a prize I feel assured you will never get: The Groupies Choice Award’. And hardly a second had passed before he texted back: 'I never knew there was an elderly category for that particular award.’”

Does he text Bono often? “Yes!”

Anyway, now he’s won the Groupies Choice Award, what next? What interests him? “Everything interests me. But I do get bored easily...”

I am getting the hint. Are you bored now?

“Ah, –––– yes.” And we finish just as we started.

Bob Geldof's new album "How To Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell" is available now on Mercury Records.